Dennis Lillee, Robert Burns and the Big Centre Forward

By Ian Irvine (Hobson), copyright, all rights reserved.

Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013. A version of this (First published in Dad Stories, a collection of stories told by Central Victorian sons about their fathers, Dokter Press, 2007). A special thank-you to writer-editors John Holton and Rebecca Sutton for their efforts in preparing this story for publication in Dad Stories. Image: half a page from Dad Stories (with thanks). Central photo is a family picture of John Irvine (my father) as a bus conductor, UK late 1950s.

I never met my Scottish grandfather, he died in 1958, six years before I was born. My dad talked about him infrequently, mostly in relation to footballsoccer, that is. My first memories of football go back to 1969. I was five and had been plonked in front of our black and white TV in the lounge of our Coronation Street style house in central Middlesborough. It must have been a Saturday because Match of the Day was on and Dad was pointing informatively at one of the little black and white figures on the screen. Thats Archie there, in the mid-field, he said. Archie who? I asked. The figure had gone off-screen and besides I didnt understand what was going on in the game. Archie Irvine, your grandads brothers son my cousin. Will he score a goal? I asked, aware that if the ball went into the net the adults cheered or growled as though they were in pain. It seemed important. No, not very often. Hes a midfielder, they dont score very often. Oh. I must have sounded disappointed because Dad added quickly, Your grandad was a goal scorer. He was a big strong centre-forward. Everybody said he was good with his head. Then Dad went a bit quiet. Soccer is all through our family. My brothers still playing at 41, for a church team in Toowoomba. Hes not even religious. Likewise, Ive rarely seen my nephew dressed in anything but football coloursusually those of Manchester United, or Manchester Incorporated as I call them. Mind you, hes also a fanatical Essendon fan, like his dad, and an Eels fan so my sister in law has to put up with all of the codes (denominations?) except Rugby Union, which the whole family (except me) hate with a passion largely due to the Springbok tour of New Zealand in the early eighties. My oldest son lives in New Zealand and though he has what Dad calls the Irvine soccer genes he has for the moment chosen the Kiwi religion, rugby union. Both of my daughters have also played soccer, the oldest had a go at indoor, and the youngest played for Spring-Gully at the age of seven. Even my three year old son kicks and chases a soccer ball like hes some sort of reincarnation of grandad. For my part, Ive followed the fortunes of Leeds United since I was little and, more recently, the Australian national teamwith all the associated agonies, anxieties and occasional ecstasies. About seven years ago, after an eighteen year break, I went back to playing the sportthis time for pure enjoyment, and to stay fit. I think about my grandad more often as a result, and my dad. Grandad, Patrick Irvine, played football professionally in Scotland and Ireland from the late twenties to the mid thirties. His major achievement was winning a Scottish Junior Cup medal in the early 30sthe equivalent of a modern day Scottish F.A. cup medal. Dad recalls seeing it pawned numerous times during WWII, Everything was pawned then my dad had a big family to feed, he could n survive on the rations alone. Dad says that when grandad went blind the Scottish FA held a benefit match for him and players came from all over Britain and Ireland, including James Delany, a star of the time. Grandad was not the only footballer in the family: his brother in law, James McPatland, was a defender for then Scottish First Division club, Alloa, and his brother,

Archie, was a much-respected amateur player. According to Dad, many good players played in amateur leagues in those days; money and sport were uneasy bedfellows. Of the next generation, two of Dads cousins signed to British professional clubs in the 1960s Archie Irvine to English first division club Sheffield Wednesday (then in the equivalent of todays Premier League) for a transfer fee of 25,000 poundsa lot of money in those daysand Raymond Irvine to Glasgow Celtic. Football thus stretches across four generations of the Irvine family. Most of my best memories of dad are tied up with it. In 1971 we left the UK for a new life in Australia. After a period in Sydney we eventually settled, in 1973, into a brand new Vin Amadio home in Salisbury Downs west of Adelaide. Dad began teaching me and my brother how to play soccer. He hardly ever talked about his own playing career except to say it was non-existent. He liked to dwell on a particularly terrible game hed had as a goalkeeper. I let in 8 goals by half time, we lost 19-1 that was the day I knew I wasnt cut out to be a keeper! Only recently did he tell me that the game had been against Rob Roy Juniors, Scotlands best youth team at the time. Dad was filling in for the local works team Martin and Black. Whenever I asked him about soccer in his own childhood back Scotland Dad invariably told us stories about his dad and his uncles. Only recently, during a short phone call to wish him a happy seventy-third birthday, did I finally ask him why he hadnt gone on to play the game himself, given the family culture. I suppose I was also skirting questions about his relationship with his father. The call went for two hours and began with dad recounting coaching techniques for seven-year-olds (Get the wee un t kick the ball against a wall, thatll gi her ball sense better still get her to use a tennis ball thats what we used as wee uns, that or an old pigs bladders or a tied up bundle of rags). It then drifted into a long discussion about Grandads career as a footballer. An hour in, and I finally plucked up the courage to ask him some questions that had been nagging at me for years. Didnt you ever want to play football? No, I canna say I ever did. Puzzled silence on may part. Grandad must have taught you some of the skills where else did you get all those coaching techniques? I ha a brain, Son, I pick things up quickly you know! Ironic laugh. Are you saying Grandad didnt encourage you to play? No, I honestly canna remember him expecting me to play. In fact, I canna even remember him coaching me. Another puzzled pause on my partfew parents today would be so remiss about teaching their kids the ins and outs of their own grand passion. He didnt want you to play? I would n say that Look, he saw football as a muck around thing, it gave him a few extra bob and allowed him to mess about with the lads. Football, any sport, was n professional in the same way back thenit wasn a career choice the way it is today. After he finished playing he had nine wee uns to feed, and it was war time remember. He was either working in the munitions factory or down in London or Coventry digging

bodies out o bombed-out buildings. His one goal for me, I suppose, was t make me an apprentice in the pub he was managing. The trouble was, he went blind ... Dad was struggling to provide me with context. Both of us realized at the same time, I think, that todays Australia is a world away from the Blitz, large families and early twentieth century ideas about sport. Look, your grandad played in the 30s, Son boot money, Sunday trips t Ireland or England, illegal bookies, playing under false nameUncle Archie was banned, you know, syn dyed, due t your grandad throwing a punch at some over-zealous English defender, got himself sent off. Trouble was hed been playing under Archies name! Why werent you interested in playing? He hadnt really answered my earlier question. To tell you the truth Ive never thought about it. You might have t ask a shrink about that one! he said thoughtfully. Eventually, seeing I wanted to understand, he said - Look, your grandad was something o a local identity around the town. When he went blind I had t walk him to the shops in Coatbridge and Airdrie and do you know we could n' go twenty feet without someone shouting out, Good-day to you, Paddy. My dad would get embarrassed when he could n' answer the person direct - I canna recognize the voice, John, who is it? hed whisper. Eventually, near the end, he hardly went out at all. I felt like a counselor, prodding away at the tender spots, So everyone knew Grandad? Aye, I was always Paddys son. From very little I remember people asking me, John, are y a footballer like your daddy? He was a grand player. Youll ha to be good to be as good as him. Pause. I got that all the time, Pat this, Paddy that I suppose I must have thought, Whats the point! Besides, I wasnt stocky like my dad. I had my mothers build, the wiry Macintyre build. I ran good marathon times in the Armyhave I told you that? No, he hadnt. Id heard lots of stories about being on potato duty in post-war Frankfurtanother version of nine goals by half-time. Its true, though, Dad never had the build of a Mark Viduka, the archetypal bullocky centre forward. I puzzled for a moment over my own build, some combination of stocky and wiry, and recalled my aunt Kathys comments on the issue, Those bairns, John meaning my brother Andrew and I, theyre the spitting image of their grandaddy! Dad broke my train of thought, Besides, there were already two footballers in the family, my cousins Raymond and Archie. Football was n something I thought about seriously. Nevertheless, the training techniques he used with my brother and I when we were young were state-of-the-art mid-century UK professional. I was interested in what it was like for Dad when granddad started to lose his sight. Look, when your grandad went blind Id sit with him on a Saturday evening listening t the match summaries on the radio. I had the job of marking down the results, for the pools. Do you know, whenever I missed a result Id tell him and hed come out with it instantaneously, all those leagues, all those games, and yet hed remember Did he talk to you about how to play the game on those nights?

I suppose so. I mean hed take the mickey out o the commentators, you know, Well let me tell you how it really is on the pitch, John! sort of stuff. I suppose I might have picked up something thenthat was in the late 40s-early 50s.' What I really wanted to ask was - Did he use sauce bottles? My own childhood was full of long after-game lectures with dad moving sauce bottles or salt and pepper shakers around the kitchen table as symbols of attackers or defenders, 'Its all about angles. Heres the attacker, you get between him and the goal, shepherd him wide, jockey, keep on your toes, and low t the ground and above all, Son, watch the ball. Though Id played representative soccer for various Auckland teams and had trialed for the NZ under fifteen and sixteen sides, my own soccer career had ended as an eighteenyear-old after a season playing senior reserves for East Coast Bays, then in the New Zealand National League. There were a number of reasons for me quitting the family religion. The first was to do with cricket, a game dad learnt to enjoy as he puts it. Id picked up a passion for cricket during our years in South Australia, in particular watching Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson in action against the Poms in the mid 70s. It still fascinates me that I was totally on the side of Australia during those matches, in part because Dad, as a workingclass Scotsman saw the English Cricket Team as symptomatic of the British class system. He was secretly pleased to see Lillee and company giving the public school boys a pasting. Only mum, a Yorkshire girl by birth, seemed concerned at Australias fastbowling onslaught. I suppose cricket allowed me to fit in with my new Aussie mates. For about four years cricket became my life. I was seen as a future New Zealand fast-bowler and was being selected for various provincial (Auckland) and national teams (culminating in being selected twice for the NZ U19 team). In 1984 I played a season with Worcestershire County Seconds and U23s in England - being paid to play sport was an amazing moment. During the same period I was being coached by the likes of Kapil Dev, Richard Hadlee and Frank Tyson. From 1982 onwards I was practicing or playing year-round, five or six days a week and spending a lot of time overseas. There was less and less time for football/soccer. Dad accepted the inevitable with a certain wistfulness. Another reason I stopped playing soccer was to do with my only partly acknowledged desire to establish my own identityseparate from Dad. Though as a young man sport came easy to me, another passion (one not in the genes, but closer to who I really was) began to assert itself. Being a professional sportsman began to feel very self-limiting. The competitive hyper-masculine culture didnt quite fit with my personality. Whole parts of myself seemed to have fallen silent. This was not something that the eighteen-year-old me could explain to Dad (or when the time came, to the many coaches and friends Id made through soccer and cricket). To Dad, if you got a break, a clear path out of working class drudgery, you took it and didnt look back. Clearly, however, I needed to quit sport before I could even think about that other life. I still wonder whether my body manufactured a serious illness in order to help me over that particular hurdle. For me the final straw came with a dream I had just before I came down with a burst appendix and severe peritonitis.

Im being coached by Denis Lillee. Were in the nets. Lillee is bowling inswinging bouncers at then New Zealand opener, John Wright. After sending down a ball or two close to Wrights throat, Lillee says, Okay, your turn. Remember dont telegraph it, dont change your run-up, just aim short outside off then chop down harder with that left shoulder. I take the ball and mark out my run. When I look up, ready to bowl, its not Wright at the other end but Dad. His pads are too small, he has no helmet and hes holding the bat like a baseballer. I run up and bowl a bouncer, as directed. Dad reacts late. Its not dignified. The ball just misses his chin. He jumps backwards striking the metal netting. I bowl again. He fends it off instinctively with an upward scoop off the splice. He drops the bat immediately. Hes jarred his hands and is wringing them frantically. The next ball hits him with a thud in the midriff and he lets out an involuntary Oooww! Despite the pain hes back at the crease for the next ball, silent and visibly trembling. I decide to make the next one even faster. As I walk back to the mark, however, I notice Lillee talking to a stocky man. I realize with shock its my dead grandad. He looks at me quietly and says simply, What are you doin, Son? Thats your daddy at the other end. The first time dad ever gave me a book of poetry as a present was in 1998. It was a collection of Robert Burns poems and I will always treasure it. When I returned to university to study the humanities in 1990 hed been puzzled but supportive. Likewise, hed remained puzzled as I dabbled in song-writing and singing. I think my PhD graduation ceremony was a minor turning point. He and Mum flew across from New Zealand for the ceremony and he was obviously proud. I think he was also relieved that Id found something to do with my life that didnt involve what he called Shoveln shit for a living. These days, as a father myself, Im surprised at the pure pleasure I feel at seeing my kids race around a paddock attempting to kick or chase a ball, any ball, even the oval shaped one! I ask myself: Are we so very far from the street football, the rags and pigs bladders, of my fathers childhood? At root sport should be about the sheer joy of movement, a kind of dance. It neednt be competitive at all. Author Bio
Dr. Ian Irvine is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in two Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of three journals and currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia) as well as the same program at Victoria University, ST Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui.